[Kzyxtalk] Crux II. KZYX.

[Marco McClean]

Tim Gregory wrote:
> ...cutting off the head, to save the body is not good
> prognosis to me. 
>
> ...the 'starve-the-budget' tactic is very Republican to me. sandbagging,
> sabotage...whatever you want to call it, it's neither loving nor helpful.  

    Marco here. Tim, how many times do I have to say this: it's the 
/managers/ who have been starving the budget since the beginning. What 
part of-

"In 2014 KZYX' managers were paid over $180,000. That's 3,600 $50 yearly 
memberships, when you only have 2,300 members. It's as if the managers 
are taking the money out of all the pledge envelopes and stuffing it in 
their own pockets, and then some..."

    -do you not grasp? Maybe I confused you when I wrote in an earlier 
post of the importance of cutting the fat at the top; maybe I should 
have said removing a parasite from the middle, a parasite that's 
consuming two-thirds of the station's ingested nutrients... No, no, then 
you'd hear /cutting out the heart to spite the ankles/.

    And I'm not 'monkeywrenching' by saying these things. I'm shining a 
light in a dark, um, intestine. KZYX' managers are failing the station 
by not maintaining crucial equipment  -what they, or rather a competent 
engineer, should be there for in the first place-  and they're failing 
the station by big spending on nonessential things, like the new 
gazillion-dollar computerized mixing board to show off to non-tech-savvy 
visitors and investors, things that don't improve the signal nor make 
anyone's show better but just squat there like a giant toad and go beep.

    Microphones, mixer, STL, transmitter and antenna equals radio 
station. You have to cover what's important first.

    Most of all they're failing the station by eating the store. You and 
others write about John Sakowitz as though he has unconscionably wrecked 
the station's finances by costing it $800 (that's right, eight hundred 
dollars) in paperwork by bringing up the license issue. $800 is less 
than 1% of what just John Coate and Mary Aigner are paid. Here: $100,000 
divided by 240 work days a year means John Coate and Mary Aigner just 
breathing office air and playing Windows solitaire suck $800 out of the 
station /every two days/.

    In other news, next month I'll be setting up the Helen Schoeni 
Theater to be able to do live radio on KNYO from the stage, for when 
they do readings and locally produced work, in between regular season 
offerings. Staged radio drama and concerts are also possible. I just 
talked with Felicia about it yesterday, and that's happening. I asked 
Bob Young about it last month; he said, "Great! Go for it!" That's what 
real managers do when you bring a good idea. They say, "Great!" and they 
make the resources available, and you do it, and then you think of 
something else to try and you try that, and you go forward and things 
get better and better. And if the owners and/or managers are getting 
paid, /you/ should be getting paid; otherwise you're hurting all workers 
everywhere. If the owners and/or managers are getting paid to have a 
nice life and save up for retirement and the workers are all 
"volunteering", there are several historical words for that kind of 
system. I'm sure you can think of some.

    At KZYX it goes rather like this: you prostrate yourself before the 
managers and submit your idea or project or show and they dick you 
around for years and treat you like a bug. And then they appoint someone 
naive and controllable to produce a half-assed version of your idea, or 
they buy a safe dull product  -with other people's money-  that looks 
similar to them, that's produced elsewhere, and if it works they claim 
credit and if it doesn't they say they gamely tried it but it's a lousy 
idea and it won't work and nobody's ever gonna do /that/ again. The same 
thing with the program advisory committee, which has been /required by 
the board/ for, what, eight years now? and Mary and John are still 
petulantly stonewalling it after sabotaging it, so that's no good. How 
is any of /that/ loving or helpful? But you've got your somnambulistic 
gig, Tim, so of course the status quo's fine with you.

    All I said was, wait to pledge until you see the change you want. 
Members and the general public have no other way to influence the board; 
they have no other input. And when new boardmembers are voted in they'll 
have a little more incentive to be responsive in future and not to 
backslide. And if better boardmembers aren't voted in, the station will 
fail, because the CPB grant is /a lot less/ money this year, and the 
managers will not accept a cut in pay, because they feel entitled to 
what they're used to, and so the organism will become even greater than 
two-thirds parasitical dysfunctional oppressive management by weight 
and, I dunno; is there anything in nature or artifice that can operate 
on those terms and thrive?

    Oh, p.s. I recovered the file in the backup recorder that was 
running when candidate for a seat on KZYX' board Doug McKenty was on my 
show two weeks ago (2015-02-06). We talked for about twenty minutes and 
then the power to the entire coast, including our broadcast booth and 
our transmitter and the internet link between them, shut off because of 
the storm. We had just begun to get rolling, too; I expected we would 
talk for an hour or more. (The sound at the end of the recording is a 
pop or two and then a fading rising squeeeee of oscillation like when 
Doctor Memory overloads at the end of We're All Bozos On This Bus by 
Firesign Theater. That's the diminishing plus and minus power rails of 
the mixing board squeezing the last pulse down to zero, like when you 
hold a ruler down on the edge of a table and twang it, but for 
electricity and much faster.)

    Anyway I put the recording on my MediaFire page for you to hear if 
you want to. Forgive my intermittent coughing. It's taking awhile to 
shake that.

    Here's the link:
http://tinyurl.com/2015-02-06KNYOInterviewMcKenty

------------